My vote for the most profound theologian of the past 50 years goes to an anonymous London taxi driver. N.T. Wright told his story back in 2010 when Wright served as the Anglican bishop of Durham. The story inspired Wright’s Easter sermon that year, and it is best to let the bishop tell it in his own words:
The taxi driver looked back at me in his mirror. His face was a mixture of amusement and sympathy. We were stuck in traffic and he’d asked me, as they do, what I did for a living.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you Church of England people’ (having told me he was a Roman Catholic himself). ‘You’re still having all that trouble about women bishops, aren’t you?’
I had to admit that that was indeed the case.
‘The way I look at it,’ he said, ‘is this: if God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, all the rest is basically rock’n’roll.’
https://ntwrightpage.com/2016/03/30/resurrection-and-rocknroll/
Rock ‘n roll indeed. Yes, that probably is an over-simplification, but the hard truth behind it is that if God did not raise Jesus Christ from the dead, then as Paul told the Corinthians: “Your faith is futile.” Most of the things that self-identified Christians squabble about are of debateable importance. But if Jesus is not raised, then they are of no importance at all.
May I suggest that we take the Resurrection of Jesus as a pair of glasses, corrective lenses through which we look at Scripture, theology, history, the physical and social sciences, and, in fact, every human endeavor? Let us remember that resurrection is not resuscitation. The description of the risen Jesus’ physical actions in the Gospels indicate much more than restoration to the life Jesus lived before his crucifixion. This is something new.
To look at our lives through those Resurrection glasses is to invite ourselves to assess and reassess all else that we believe. Maybe how we see our world is more a product of the culture in which we were raised and less the product of Jesus’ Kingdom.
The Apprentice Priest 